"Biodivergent Sites and Sounds" (BSS) immerses audiences in a neurodivergent (ND) space where nature is experienced as a living "being," evoking resonance through vulnerability and openness. Participants "become" the canal, embodying pollution through stimming, (a divergent "go-to" when the world is too sensory-overloading; repetitive movements and motions. In turn, participants create a deep, sensory connection with their surroundings. This approach makes the climate crisis tangible and engages participants in a dialogue that transcends traditional environmental narratives. The collaboration within BSS, featuring ND artists, my leadership and direction in collaboration with a ND creative technologist, generates new knowledges and cross-disciplinary processes. By using autistic stimming as a transformative artistic tool and methodology, BSS shows how artistic research can innovate and inspire across sectors, enhancing skills and awareness. This transferability of experience is central to resonance, extending the project's impact beyond the installation. BSS also addresses the conflict and crisis inherent in ND experiences within a neuronormative system/structure. BSS embodies the uncanny, reflecting the lived reality of ND individuals, evoking understanding/cooperation between ND and neurotypical worlds. The project employs counterfactual thinking through surreal and symbolic imagery, challenging conventional narratives and opening new possibilities. By blending reality with dream worlds, BSS invites participants to engage with the ND space and "what if" scenarios, inspiring transformative change. Integrating ancestral senses with contemporary concerns, BSS resonates with current cultural & environmental needs. The project’s material culture reflects these needs, creating a time-based artistic experience that deepens participants' sense of belonging. Over time, BSS becomes a resonant, transformative experience, embodying the essence of resonance.

If new futures are to be imagined, there is an imperative for research which denies the assimilation of historically established knowledge systems such as those which absorb the Nature/Society binary. Utilising methods of world ecology through an entwined arts and social sciences practice, my research adopts a transdisciplinary approach to investigate the environment making dynamics of fossil carbons. Nowhere is the hypostatization of the Nature/Society dualism more apparent than in the ontology of oil, described as “the structuring ‘Real’ of our contemporary sociopolitical imaginary” (Szeman, 2010). It is impossible to imagine or conceive of contemporary life existing as it does without fossil carbons. To overcome its inevitability, we need to change the way we know oil. Artistic research approaches enable imperceptible, distant and historical connections to be made visible, and new, emancipatory futures imagined. My research begins in the 75 hectares of land in Ingolstadt, Germany, formerly home to the ERIAG oil refineries of Bayernoil. Utilising situated photographic techniques as well as the analysis of existent visual materials, I follow the interconnected industrial practices of fossil carbons outwards from the Ingolstadt site as nexus. My presentation questions established narratives of industry by drawing together constellations of materials to explore how artistic research can change our experience and understanding of deep time. Early postcards from extraction sites featuring text ‘TEXAS OIL WELL AFLAME!’; photographs created through situatedness in refinery neighbourhoods in Texas; sound recordings from global gas conferences; self-made maps of oil pipelines in Bavaria: what insight can a more-than-representational understanding of these materials offer when understood through oil as the ancient death of microorganisms and plants, and capitalism as an organising force? How might petro-geographies be unmade through transdisciplinary, artistic engagement?

How does musical creation engage with real-world elements so as to affect the listening experience in an integrated or situated way? What are these elements and how do they interact with the perception of sounds, not merely as a metaphor, but effectively in a concrete experiential way, integrating experience in a larger field of meaning and consequence? Since my PhD on the relations between music and architectural practice and thought, I have been developing works that, while traversing other areas of disciplinary intersections, in different ways engage with input from specific real-world situations. By developing different strategies of association, binding sounds to what is normally considered outside the discipline, these works have helped me explore methodologies of musical composition that expand the semantic reach of the works, allowing for a more comprehensive listening. Questioning the limits of music as a discipline, and the role of its institutions today, this research explores musical practice as a device of inquiry and transformation, one that rejects stable and autonomous objects, or any programme of “reduced listening”, impermeable to context. Looking at what is becoming more and more a situated practice, and confronting it with other more permeable practices, I try to understand the different transferabilities that occur in some works, what kind of processes can be identified that establish meaningful connections to lived-world experience, hence contributing to developing the act of listening as engagement, as a more active partaking in a common construction of meaning. Discussing ideas such as “relational music”, “non-fictional music”, “context-based composition”, “artistic device” or “extradisciplinarity”, I will give and overall view of my recent practice, to understand how they operate different modes of permeability with the lived-world, highlighting their implication, and hopefully enhance their resonance in the world.

This performance-lecture arises from artistic research, using sited creative practices - including field recordings, sound-making, movement and song - to explore Portuguese forest plantations in fire season. This creative field work responds to pressing global issues, including the effects of a warming climate, which reverberate through anthropogenic, or human-made, natural landscapes such as the pine and eucalyptus plantations of central Portugal. These are deeply ambivalent, contested places, made by humans, but primarily occupied by more-than-humans. Around the planted and industrially extracted trees hangs a legacy of state afforestation and rural depopulation, as well as present fire risks. In an era of climate crisis, they are both a counter to human-made carbon emissions and an example of ‘cheap nature’ (Moore and Patel 2018), where trees are treated as a resource to be extracted as efficiently as possible. The plantations are also full of surprising beauty, feral happenings and ‘unruly edges’ (Tsing 2015) that soften and counteract the straight lines of industrial extraction. The research is currently exploring affective and resonant materialities – how it feels to be in these spaces. Such feelings arise from the trees labouring for humans and being life-limited because of this, from their characterisation as flammable ‘fuel load’ and risky materialities, and from their presence as living beings, communities, and homes for multiple species. The creative field work reaches into these contradictory feelings to foster a deeper, more nuanced understanding of anthropogenic landscapes. It seeks new ways of expressing our relationships with the more-than-human in such places, alongside creative ways of being, which might transform perspectives of what they are and what they are for. The project also aims to explore the controlled extraction of nature, alongside how it feels to live in landscapes that are seen as increasingly risky and outside the control of humans.

When examining how writers, designers, musicians, and weavers describe the elements and tools of their craft, similarities emerge in their use of keywords such as rhythm, melody, texture, and perception. Texture in writing, for example, can be expressed as the richness of text or the tactile qualities of words, as emphasized by writer and artist Jonathan Miles. Weavers convey the same sensorial aspects of touch and feel, but that of the cloth. The disciplines of craft, design and the arts thus share a strong engagement with the human senses. Otti Berger (1898–1944) exemplified the use of these keywords and sensorial aspects in her textile work and writings. As one of the most important textile designers of the Bauhaus, alongside Anni Albers and Gunta Stölzl, Berger's contributions were significant. However, as a Hungarian-Jewish woman, she faced severe restrictions, work bans, and ultimately deportation by the National Socialists, culminating in her death at Auschwitz in 1944. Berger's writings, such as her 1930 manifesto "Stoffe im Raum" ("Textiles in Space"), underscore the importance of sensorial considerations in textile design. While her writing is not poetry, the way she writes about textiles and their sensory significance possess poetic qualities: "[…] a fabric needs to be grasped […] for one must listen to the fabric's secrets, track down the sounds of materials," she advises, emphasizing the importance of material choice, color, and function. By examining Otti Berger’s work and writings through archival research, my contribution also incorporates insights from interviews with contemporary weavers. These interviews confirm that Berger's thesis on the sensuality of textiles remains relevant today. The weaver’s perspectives, too, highlight the serendipitous intersections between the different practices and the shared sensorial engagement that underpins these diverse forms of creative expression.